Peace Puppies

I think it was all over for my husband when my mother-in-law told him that not getting dogs would be child abuse. She has not always been my advocate, but at that moment all my inadequacies as a daughter-in-law seemed to melt away. And vice versa. I can’t emphasize enough the improbability of this moment except to suggest that we should send a canine emissary to the next Israeli/Palestinian peace talks. In my divided house, at least, there was immediate consensus that each of my boys needed his own dog.

We were planning to look at a pair of Beagle-mix, six-month-old sibling puppies the next day. How do you bring your dog-hungry kids to “look” merely at puppies? As rescue dogs, these pups were in foster care, and their caretaker needed to meet the whole family, and we needed to test Tom’s allergies and assess the dispositions of all involved (human and canine alike). I’ll spare you the narrative of our morning, which involved an hour’s drive in the rain, a conversation with the children about the responsibilities of caring for dogs (which I’m sure made a deep, lasting impression), a buggy romp in a park, peals of delight from the children and even a smile from Tom. In the end, it was agreed. Despite all the obvious challenges ahead (Beagles catch a scent and run, they bark, they bay, they chew and dig and play), it was a delightful match. One is small and cuddly, the other more independent and single-minded.  I’m talking about the dogs (see photo), although our children also fit that description.

While we learned about the dogs’ past and their health histories, I encouraged Tom to bury his face in their fur. I think he held back some sniffles, but since he is a grown man capable of making tough choices and declared that his allergies were not triggered, I can only assume they were sniffles of joy. This joy was compounded only by the hours of shopping that Tom would have to endure that afternoon. 

Before we could bring puppies home, we needed to have a few basics in place:  crate, toys, dish, food, collars & leashes. Not nearly as long as the list I made for our first baby, though eerily similar. Basically, we needed to demonstrate that we could feed, occupy and contain them. Also make a vet appointment. So we stopped in Manchester on the way home. After the kids spent thirty minutes negotiating the color of each dog collar, they had the nerve to argue over getting peppers on their Pepe’s pizza. I began to foresee the whole operation unraveling. I reached back into young motherhood and suggested that we all play a game while waiting for our lunch. No one was more surprised than me that our modified game of “Geography” worked. We were having fun, and we didn’t even have the dogs yet. It occurred to me that this was our first full-day family outing in a long, long time. We are usually running from someone’s soccer game to another’s music lesson to karate and back.  There we sat with a common purpose and not just common complaints. We were there because we were getting dogs and we needed to all get along (quick!) before Daddy changed his mind.